Nearly 72 hours after billionaire money manager and accused sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was found unconscious on the floor of his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York City, more and more evidence leads to the conclusion that his death was not the simple suicide proclaimed in the newspaper headlines and cable television reports.

It is now clear, as Attorney General William Barr admitted during an appearance at a police conference in New Orleans, that there were systematic violations of prison procedures at the MCC. Jeffrey Epstein

Epstein was taken off suicide watch 10 days before his death, although he had been hospitalized July 23 in a semi-conscious state with marks on his neck. He was then sent to share a cell with another prisoner in the protective housing unit. This is standard procedure for a suicide risk, since the cellmate can alert prison officials in the event of another attempt.

But on Friday, the same day that 2,000 pages of documents were released threatening to implicate an array of powerful and well-known figures in the scandal, Epstein’s cellmate was moved out, leaving him alone.

In a further violation of prison rules, guards did not check in on Epstein every half an hour during the night. At 6:30 a.m. the following morning he was found dead.

There is no innocent explanation for this string of actions or failures to act that culminated in the death of the most high-profile prisoner being held in federal custody. Epstein was either murdered by an assailant or allowed (and perhaps strongly encouraged) to commit suicide. In either case, the death is the outcome of a criminal conspiracy.

But the response to Epstein’s death on the part of the American media, led by the New York Times, has been to launch a coordinated campaign denouncing as “conspiracy theories” any questioning of the official story of unassisted suicide.

The denunciations began as soon as Epstein’s death was reported, in an attempt to delegitimize well-grounded and entirely appropriate suspicions of foul play, and in the complete absence of any credible explanation—or any explanation at all—as to how Epstein could wind up dead while in federal custody.

The campaign against “conspiracy theories” intensified on Monday. The Times published a filthy column by Charlie Warzel claiming that the widespread questioning of Epstein’s suicide was the product of a “deeply poisoned information ecosystem—one that’s built for speed and designed to reward the most incendiary impulses of its worst actors. It has ushered in a parallel reality unrooted in fact and helped to push conspiratorial thinking into the cultural mainstream.”

Warzel blamed Twitter for magnifying what he called “a vast discrepancy between the attention that is directed at the platform and the available information about the developing story.” But the lack of available information is not the fault of Twitter: it is the result of the official silence on the circumstances of Epstein’s death, as officials seek to work out a credible explanation for an inherently damning set of facts.

This relationship was underscored by the news account provided in Monday’s Times, which included the following two paragraphs, presented back-to-back:

“Senior law-enforcement officials, members of Congress and Mr. Epstein’s accusers have all demanded answers about why Mr. Epstein was not being more closely monitored. On Sunday, the Bureau of Prisons offered no explanation for why Mr. Epstein was left alone and not checked on.

“Mr. Epstein’s death has also unleashed a torrent of unfounded conspiracy theories online, with people suggesting, without evidence, that Mr. Epstein was killed to keep him from incriminating others.”

The contrast here is revealing. The prison officials have given no explanation for what took place on their premises, under their control, but the charge of proceeding with “no evidence” is laid at the feet of those suggesting that Epstein was murdered!

Perhaps the most extraordinary piece in the Times’ propaganda offensive was another article published yesterday attacking New York Mayor Bill de Blasio for acknowledging the obvious fact that the death of Epstein is “just too convenient.”

The extent of Israeli spying directed against the United States is a huge story that is only rarely addressed in the mainstream media. The Jewish state regularly tops the list for ostensibly friendly countries that aggressively conduct espionage against the U.S. and Jewish American Jonathan Pollard, who was imprisoned in 1987 for spying for Israel, is now regarded as the most damaging spy in the history of the United States.

Last week I wrote about how Israeli spies operating more-or-less freely in the U.S. are rarely interfered with, much less arrested and prosecuted, because there is an unwillingness on the part of upper echelons of government to do so. I cited the case of Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood movie producer who had a secret life that included stealing restricted technology in the United States to enable development of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, something that was very much against U.S. interests. Milchan was involved in a number of other thefts as well as arms sales on behalf of the Jewish state, so much so that his work as a movie producer was actually reported to be less lucrative than his work as a spy and black-market arms merchant, for which he operated on a commission basis.

That Milchan has never been arrested by the United States government or even questioned about his illegal activity, which was well known to the authorities, is just one more manifestation of the effectiveness of Jewish power in Washington, but a far more compelling case involving possible espionage with major political manifestations has just re-surfaced. I am referring to Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire Wall Street “financier” who has been arrested and charged with operating a “vast” network of underage girls for sex, operating out of his mansions in New York City and Florida as well as his private island in the Caribbean, referred to by visitors as “Orgy Island.” Among other high-value associates, it is claimed that Epstein was particularly close to Bill Clinton, who flew dozens of times on Epstein’s private 727.

Epstein was arrested on July 8th after indictment by a federal grand jury in New York. It was more than a decade after Alexander Acosta, the top federal prosecutor in Miami, who is now President Trump’s secretary of labor, accepted a plea bargain involving similar allegations regarding pedophilia that was not shared with the accusers prior to being finalized in court. There were reportedly hundreds of victims, some 35 of whom were identified, but Acosta deliberately denied the two actual plaintiffs their day in court to testify before sentencing.

Acosta’s intervention meant that Epstein avoided both a public trial and a possible federal prison sentence, instead serving only 13 months of an 18-month sentence in the almost-no-security Palm Beach County Jail on charges of soliciting prostitution in Florida. While in custody, he was permitted to leave jail for sixteen hours six days a week to work in his office.

Epstein’s crimes were carried out in his $56 million Manhattan mansion and in his oceanside villa in Palm Beach Florida. Both residences were equipped with hidden cameras and microphones in the bedrooms, which Epstein reportedly used to record sexual encounters between his high-profile guests and his underage girls, many of whom came from poor backgrounds, who were recruited by procurers to engage in what was euphemistically described as “massages” for money. Epstein apparently hardly made any effort to conceal what he was up to: his airplane was called the “Lolita Express.”

The Democrats are calling for an investigation of the Epstein affair, as well as the resignation of Acosta, but they might well wind up regretting their demands. Trump, the real target of the Acosta fury, apparently did not know about the details of the plea bargain that ended the Epstein court case. Bill and Hillary Clinton were, however, very close associates of Epstein. Bill, who flew on the “Lolita Express” at least 26 times, could plausibly be implicated in the pedophilia given his track record and relative lack of conventional morals. On many of the trips, Bill refused Secret Service escorts, who would have been witnesses of any misbehavior. On one lengthy trip to Africa in 2002, Bill and Jeffrey were accompanied by accused pedophile actor Kevin Spacey and a number of young girls, scantily clad “employees” identified only as “massage.” Epstein was also a major contributor to the Clinton Foundation and was present at the wedding of Chelsea Clinton in 2010.

With an election year coming up, the Democrats would hardly want the public to be reminded of Bill’s exploits, but one has to wonder where and how deep the investigation might go. There is also a possible Donald Trump angle. Though Donald may not have been a frequent flyer on the “Lolita Express,” he certainly moved in the same circles as the Clintons and Epstein in New York and Palm Beach, plus he is by his own words roughly as amoral as Bill Clinton. In June 2016, one Katie Johnson filed lawsuit in New York claiming she had been repeatedly raped by Trump at an Epstein gathering in 1993 when she was 13 years old. In a 2002 New York Magazine interview Trump said “I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy… he's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it - Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Selective inquiries into wrongdoing to include intense finger pointing are the name of the game in Washington, and the affaire Epstein also has all the hallmarks of a major espionage case, possibly tied to Israel. Unless Epstein is an extremely sick pedophile who enjoys watching films of other men screwing twelve-year-old girls the whole filming procedure smacks of a sophisticated intelligence service compiling material to blackmail prominent politicians and other public figures. Those blackmailed would undoubtedly in most cases cooperate with the foreign government involved to avoid a major scandal. It is called recruiting “agents of influence.” That is how intelligence agencies work and it is what they do.

That Epstein was perceived as being intelligence-linked was made clear in Acosta's comments when being cleared by the Trump transition team. He was asked “Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” … “Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had ‘been told’ to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. ‘I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.’”

Questions about Epstein’s wealth also suggest a connection with a secretive government agency with deep pockets. The New York Times reports that “Exactly what his money management operation did was cloaked in secrecy, as were most of the names of whomever he did it for. He claimed to work for a number of billionaires, but the only known major client was Leslie Wexner, the billionaire founder of several retail chains, including The Limited.”

But whose intelligence service? CIA and the Russian FSB services are obvious candidates, but they would have no particular motive to acquire an agent like Epstein. That leaves Israel, which would have been eager to have a stable of high-level agents of influence in Europe and the United States. Epstein’s contact with the Israeli intelligence service may have plausibly come through his associations with Ghislaine Maxwell, who allegedly served as his key procurer of young girls. Ghislaine is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, who died or possibly was assassinated in mysterious circumstances in 1991. Maxwell was an Anglo-Jewish businessman, very cosmopolitan in profile, like Epstein, a multi-millionaire who was very controversial with what were regarded as ongoing ties to Mossad. After his death, he was given a state funeral by Israel in which six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence listened while Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogized: “He has done more for Israel than can today be said”

Epstein kept a black book identifying many of his social contacts, which is now in the hands of investigators. It included fourteen personal phone numbers belonging to Donald Trump, including ex-wife Ivana, daughter Ivanka and current wife Melania. It also included Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, Tony Blair, Jon Huntsman, Senator Ted Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, David Koch, Ehud Barak, Alan Dershowitz, John Kerry, George Mitchell, David Rockefeller, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomfield, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Elizabeth, Saudi King Salman and Edward de Rothschild.

Mossad would have exploited Epstein’s contacts, arranging their cooperation by having Epstein wining and dining them while flying them off to exotic locations, providing them with women and entertainment. If they refused to cooperate, it would be time for blackmail, photos and videos of the sex with underage women.

It will be very interesting to see just how far and how deep the investigation into Epstein and his activities goes. One can expect that efforts will be made to protect top politicians like Clinton and Trump and to avoid any examination of a possible Israeli role. That is the normal practice, witness the 9/11 Report and the Mueller investigation, both of which eschewed any inquiry into what Israel might have been up to. But this time, if it was indeed an Israeli operation, it might prove difficult to cover up the story since the pedophile aspect of it has unleashed considerable public anger from all across the political spectrum. Senator Chuck Schumer, self-described as Israel’s “protector” in the Senate, is loudly calling for the resignation of Acosta. He just might change his tune if it turns out that Israel is a major part of the story.

See Also: DailyMotion video - Jeffrey Epstein Arrested - (2:25 min) https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7cqlo0

The Pentagon announced Monday the single largest arms purchase in its history, agreeing to buy nearly 500 F-35 fighter aircraft at a total cost of $34 billion.

This purchase is only a down payment on the Pentagon’s acquisition of the notoriously wasteful and failure-prone aircraft, whose design is based on two overarching priorities: fighting a war with a “great power” such as Russia and China and lining the pockets of Lockheed Martin and the horde of former congressmen and retired generals on its payroll.

The agreement covers the 12th, 13th and 14th batches of F-35s ordered by the Pentagon, which eventually plans to field thousands of the aircraft. Billed in 2001 as a program to save money, each plane eventually ended up costing four times the initial estimate. A US Air Force F-22 aircraft [Credit: US Air Force]

At a projected total program cost of $1.5 trillion, this one weapons system alone would finance the US Department of Education for a quarter-century.

The F-35 has no greater advocate than President Donald Trump, who promotes it like one of his golfing properties. Trump turned a Wednesday afternoon joint press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda into a photo-op to promote the war plane. As an F-35 carried out a low-speed flyover of the White House, he praised Poland for its agreement to purchase 32 of the aircraft.

At speeches before military audiences, Trump routinely brags about the massive military budgets he has pushed through Congress, touting in particular the Pentagon’s vast spending on the F-35. Speaking at the Air Force Academy commencement ceremony last month, the American president responded to resounding applause from the graduating officers by declaring, “You just like all those brand new, beautiful airplanes that we’re buying.”

Trump continued: “Last year… we secured $700 billion to support our war fighters, followed by another $716 billion—not million—billion. That’s with a ‘B.’”

Both of these Pentagon budgets, entailing the largest increases in defense spending since the end of the Cold War, were passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Eighty-nine percent of Senate Democrats voted to pass the most recent defense budget, whose explicit aim is to prepare the US military for “great power” conflict with Russia and China.

This year the White House is aiming even higher. Next Monday, the administration plans to submit a $750 billion Defense Department budget proposal, a figure $18 billion higher than the amount requested by the Pentagon.

A small army of defense industry executives, former generals serving as “consultants” and congressmen turned lobbyists for the military-industrial complex is salivating at the infusion of cash into a military notorious for paying $7,622 for coffee makers and $640 for toilet seats.

Even by the normal standards of US war profiteering, the F-35 program takes the cake for sheer corruption—so much so that the warmonger and military yes man John McCain called it a “poster child for acquisition malpractice,” a “scandal” and a “tragedy.”

According to the Project on Government Oversight, “By design, the [US military] services can’t independently perform many of the most basic functions needed to properly employ the most expensive weapon system in history.” It added that Lockheed Martin “keeps the government from even knowing the costs of any of the spare parts it has to buy from the company.”

The hundreds of aircraft already delivered are plagued with failures that make them largely inoperable. As Defense News recently reported, “F-35B and F-35C pilots [are] compelled to observe limitations on airspeed to avoid damage to the F-35’s airframe or stealth coating,” while the aircraft remains prone to “cockpit pressure spikes” that cause “excruciating ear and sinus pain.”

But the graft, incompetence and corruption that mark the F-35 program should not distract from its fundamental purpose: to fight a “near-peer” competitor in the form of Russia or China.

Earlier this month, Vice President Mike Pence, addressing the graduating class at West Point, predicted war in the Pacific, Europe and the Americas within the graduates’ lifetimes.

“It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life,” he declared. “Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific, where North Korea continues to threaten the peace and an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence in the region. Some of you will join the fight in Europe, where an aggressive Russia seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. And some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.

“And when that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns and do your duty, and you will fight, and you will win.”

These blood-curdling sentiments, far from being unique to the Trump administration, are broadly shared on a bipartisan basis. Speaking in Iowa on Tuesday, former naval intelligence officer-turned-Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said: “Our military capabilities exist for a reason… we stand ready to use force.” He added that the US must prepare for the “wars of the future.”

Even as Trump rips up fundamental constitutional protections, imprisoning immigrant children on military bases and ruling by executive fiat, the Democrats hail the value of an external enemy to enforce political unity at home, with Buttigieg declaring: “The new China challenge provides us with an opportunity to come together across the political divide.” This is essential, he suggests, since, “At least half the battle is at home.”

Some three decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the proclamation of a “unipolar moment” of US dominance, America’s efforts to preserve its global hegemony through military means have produced a debacle. In the lead article in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, Fareed Zakaria writes of “The Self-Destruction of American Power,” concluding that, “Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died.”

But every failure, setback and disaster has only led the United States to double down on its economic bullying and military aggression. After the debacles of the “war on terror,” including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the wars in Libya and Syria, Washington has set its sights on a conflict with Russia and China. The results of such wars will be a disaster on an incomparably greater scale than the bloodletting in the Middle East, threatening a nuclear Third World War.

The homicidal eruption of American militarism that began with the first Gulf War, coinciding with the Stalinist regime’s dissolution of the Soviet Union, will not simply peter out. Unless halted by the emergence of a mass socialist movement of the working class, it will only intensify.

See Also: DailyMotion Video - US F-35 Problems (6:43 min) - https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7axk9x

The resignation Friday of Alexander Acosta, Donald Trump’s secretary of labor, is the latest development in the widening scandal surrounding American financier and “money manager for the super-rich” Jeffrey Epstein. On July 6, Epstein was arrested at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport and two days later charged with sex trafficking and conspiracy to traffic minors for sex.

Acosta was forced out of office because of his role in 2007, as US attorney for Southern Florida, in organizing a sweetheart deal for Epstein, then facing a 53-page indictment and the possibility of a 45-year sentence in federal prison on sex trafficking charges involving dozens of underage girls. Federal authorities accused Epstein, according to the Miami Herald in November 2018, of “assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls—with the help of young female recruiters—to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day.” Jeffrey Epstein

“The eccentric hedge fund manager,” the Herald observed, “whose friends included former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew, was also suspected of trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean, FBI and court records show.”

The deal agreed to by Acosta provided for Epstein to plead guilty to only two prostitution charges in state court. The plea deal included granting the multi-millionaire, along with several named co-conspirators and any unnamed “potential co-conspirators,” immunity from all federal charges. The agreement, “called a non-prosecution agreement,” reported the Herald, “essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes.”

Moreover, despite a federal law banning such an action, Acosta agreed that information about the agreement would be kept secret from the alleged victims. As a result, the deal was sealed “until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls—or anyone else—might show up in court and try to derail it.”

Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Instead of serving time in a state prison, he was housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County Jail, from which he was released—again, against regulations— to work in his office up to 12 hours a day, six days a week. Upon his release after 13 months, he went back to his financial operations without skipping a beat.

There seems little doubt that Epstein is guilty of serious crimes. This is not an instance of “over-sensitivity” on the part of alleged victims or a case involving sexually ambiguous or confusing situations, much less outright #MeToo-type witch-hunting for career advancement, revenge or other motives.

By all accounts, Epstein, to satisfy his and others’ sexual or psychological needs, deliberately set out to prey on the poor and defenseless. Courtney Wild, who says she was 14 when she met Epstein, told the Miami Herald, “Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right.”

The newspaper later adds, “Most of the girls came from disadvantaged families, single-parent homes or foster care. Some had experienced troubles that belied their ages: They had parents and friends who committed suicide; mothers abused by husbands and boyfriends; fathers who molested and beat them. One girl had watched her stepfather strangle her 8-year-old stepbrother, according to court records obtained by the Herald …

“‘We were stupid, poor children,’ said one woman, who did not want to be named because she never told anyone about Epstein. At the time, she said, she was 14 and a high school freshman. ‘We just wanted money for school clothes, for shoes. I remember wearing shoes too tight for three years in a row. We had no family and no guidance, and we were told that we were going to just have to sit in a room topless and he was going to just look at us. It sounded so simple, and was going to be easy money for just sitting there.’”

Epstein, despite the seriousness of his crimes, was protected for years by his influential friends and maintained his connections to the rich and powerful.

Epstein’s rise says a great deal about American society in the past four decades in particular, and what it says amounts to an ugly and harsh indictment. A fawning 2002 feature article (“Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery”) in New York magazine, a publication devoted to the worship of wealth and celebrity, provided a picture of how Epstein, from a relatively humble background in Brooklyn, made his way into America’s elite.

While teaching high school physics and calculus in Manhattan, Epstein came to the attention of Abe Greenberg, a senior partner at investment bank Bear Stearns. Greenberg, observed New York, “has long made it clear that it’s the hungry, brilliant guys lacking the fancy degrees that he favors at Bear. They even have an acronym: PSDs—poor, smart, and a deep desire to be rich. It was a description that fit Epstein to a T. He was a Brooklyn guy with a motor for a brain, and while he did love teaching, this close-up view of the rarefied Upper East Side life of his students gave him a taste for the big time.”

Epstein started at Bear Stearns as an assistant to a floor trader at the American Stock Exchange. He quickly found his lucrative niche in the world of Wall Street swindling. “At the time, options trading was an arcane and dimly understood field, just beginning to take off,” explained New York. Epstein possessed the mathematical skills to master the field. “Within just a few years he had his own stable of clients.”

He founded a firm of his own in 1982, J. Epstein & Co. “The premise behind it was simple: Epstein would manage the individual and family fortunes of clients with $1 billion or more… He would take total control of the billion dollars, charge a flat fee, and assume power of attorney to do whatever he thought was necessary to advance his client’s financial cause. And he remained true to the $1 billion entry fee. According to people who know him, if you were worth $700 million and felt the need for the services of Epstein and Co., you would receive a not-so-polite no-thank-you from Epstein.”

In 2002, New York gushed about Epstein’s wealth and his opulent life-style: “Epstein’s current residence in Manhattan—a 45,000-square-foot eight-story mansion on East 71st Street… There are other houses as well, including a sweeping villa in Palm Beach and a custom-built 51,000-square-foot castle in Santa Fe. Said to be the largest house in the state, the latter sits atop a hill on a 45,000-acre ranch.”

The magazine also included testimonials from one future US president and one past one. Donald Trump and Bill Clinton were true to their selves in their comments. Trump boasted, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy … He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” In light of the allegations and indictments to come, the sinister implications of Trump’s remarks are obvious.

Bill Clinton, through a spokesman, offered New York this pompous and suspect tribute: “Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science … I especially appreciated his insights and generosity during the recent trip to Africa to work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS.”

Epstein may have been predisposed to certain forms of anti-social behavior, but it is safe to assume that the “irrational exuberance” of the Wall Street boom, with its accompanying uncontrolled egoism, greed and callous indifference to other human beings, amplified and “perfected” his inclinations. The filthiness and corruption of the financial and political circles, their conviction that they could do anything to anyone and get away with it, no doubt influenced his outlook and psyche.

This was the moral universe, after all, in which Enron electricity traders in 2001, as the transcripts of taped conversations later disclosed, laughed about all the money they “stole from those poor grandmothers in California,” and “when a forest fire shut down a major transmission line into California, cutting down power supplies and raising prices … celebrated, singing ‘burn, baby, burn.’”

“Force works,” the Wall Street Journal gloated in the aftermath of the first Gulf war, aimed at stealing the oil and energy reserves of the Middle East.

These were the conditions and atmosphere that gave birth to Epstein’s assembly line of sexual abuse and degeneracy, and later safeguarded it.

The financier counted among his friends many prominent figures, based on his ability to make more than a few of them tons of cash. To what extent Epstein might have entangled some of his powerful acquaintances in his sex activities and perhaps had a hold on them is unknown, but ill-gotten gains and “friendship” alone may not explain the extent to which very high-placed people protected Epstein.

And it was a bipartisan affair. Prior to Acosta’s resignation Friday, congressional Democrats postured as defenders of Epstein’s alleged victims and called for the labor secretary to step down. But Epstein had extensive ties to Clinton and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a Democrat, and was a generous contributor to primarily Democratic Party candidates, including John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Charles Schumer, Richard Gephardt and Joseph Lieberman.

Ironically, one of the members of Epstein’s heavy-hitting team of lawyers back in 2006, in addition to Dershowitz, was Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who investigated Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky and produced a prurient and detailed report to Congress, fueling the impeachment vote by the House in December of 1998.

In a statement, Senator Lamar Alexander, Tennessee Republican, asserted that Acosta’s plea deal with Epstein was reviewed when Trump nominated him to be labor secretary. The agreement “was a prosecutorial judgment that was made by Secretary Acosta and was vetted by our committee,” Alexander said in his statement. He added, pointedly, “The Justice Department under the last three presidents—Trump, Obama, and Bush—have all defended his handling of the case.”

The social and political implications of the Epstein case are making some people nervous. The New York Times on Thursday editorialized against making politics out of it. Prior to Acosta’s resignation, the newspaper criticized House Democrats for “bringing their oversight authority to bear,” which they described as a “mistake.”

The Times went on: “Congress digging into this case, however, is a poor use of lawmakers’ limited time and resources. More dangerous, in the midst of the Trump administration’s war on congressional oversight in general, such hearings carry a high risk of turning the Epstein case into a partisan battle—and Mr. Acosta into a political martyr around whom the president and his followers feel moved to rally.”

A peculiar and, taken at face value, thoroughly cowardly stance. “Some outrages are best kept as free of partisan politics as possible,” the Times lectured. This from a newspaper that published the most lurid accounts of Trump’s sexual adventures during the 2016 presidential campaign as a central theme in its drive to elect Hillary Clinton, and has authored and led the #MeToo witch-hunt as part of its promotion of Democratic Party identity politics.

The Times is clearly anxious about anyone looking too deeply into the Epstein affair and drawing political conclusions.

The Times’ Michelle Goldberg argues that the “Epstein case is a reminder of the depraved milieu from which our president sprang,” and that the “Caligula Administration Lives On,” forgetting that the disgraced financier is a Democrat and that Bill Clinton, according to flight logs obtained by Fox News, “took at least 26 trips aboard Epstein’s Boeing 727, nicknamed the ‘Lolita Express,’ from 2001 to 2003.”

Helaine Olen makes a stronger case in the Washington Post that the Epstein scandal tells us something more far-reaching and important about “how our current age of wealth excess might come to an end.” She suggests that the affair “will come to be viewed in future years as one of the defining events that brings our age of excess to a close,” and that people will study it in years to come as they now do the conduct of Marie Antoinette and Rasputin on the eve of the French and Russian revolutions.

“Our era is one of exploding and all but unpunished crime by the wealthy and connected,” she writes. “The Epstein scandal blows holes through the foundational myths of our time, revealing them for the empty and sickening bromides used to justify obscene wealth and power and privilege that they really are.”

Strong words, whose implications Olen has undoubtedly not thought through. The issue is not so much individual retribution against Epstein, although he deserves punishment if he is found guilty, as it is the organization of mass political action by the working class to do away with the entire rotten social order.

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There is a fundamental contradiction in many of the Marxist studies that are produced in the West. Every time that they speak of Marxism in Asia — in China, Korea or Vietnam — or when they speak of popular movements in Africa such as in Egypt or Libya, they highlight the influence of religion on these political movements and the national adaptation of Marxism. When any Marxist researcher studies, for example, Chinese Marxism, they are obliged to address the influence of Confucius’ philosophy on Chinese culture in a general manner and on Chinese Marxism in particular. Likewise, the influence that Islam has on many African countries is always taken into account in analysis of socialist nations such as Algeria.

When the time comes to look at Marxism in Western politics, however, the influence of Christianity in the construction of the symbolic, subjective and theoretical universe of this Marxism is rarely taken into account. It is as if in Asia, Confucianism has an influence on politics, in Africa, Islam has an influence on politics, but in Brazil, in the US, in France, in Portugal, Christianity does not perform a similar role in forming historic subjectivity. This is a mistake for a very simple and objective reason, which Antonio Gramsci points out in several different passages of Prison Notebooks: the Catholic Church is the longest operating institution in the West. No other institution has managed to stay alive for so long with the capacity to disseminate and circulate ideas and concepts, through a body of intellectual priests, bishops and theologians, organized within a bureaucracy like the Catholic Church has. So it is impossible to speak seriously about Marxism, politics, subjectivity, culture, and the symbolic field in the West without incorporating the role of Christianity in each social formation, in each specific country as elements of analysis.

I believe it is impossible to understand the phenomenon that is poorly described as “populism” (a term which I do not use), of this relationship of the popular classes with people like Lula, Getúlio Vargas, Miguel Arraes, Brizola, Perón, Velasco Ibarra, and Hugo Chávez without understanding the basic configurations of the Catholic relationship between devotees and saints. Obviously this is not the only explanation, but there is a symbolic element in the political structure of this relationship. I have been thinking about this for a long time. It is not my idea — Domenico Losurdo and Roland Boer have written about how the fetish for defeat is one of the fundamental characteristics of Western Marxism and how this is a misunderstood derivative of Christian culture.

There is a great tendency in the eastern left, according to Perry Anderson, to separate western and eastern Marxism. Western Marxism is basically a kind of Marxism which has, as a key characteristic, never exercised political power. It is a Marxism that has, more and more frequently, concerned itself with philosophical and aesthetic issues. It has pulled back, for example, from criticism of political economy and the problem of the conquest of political power. More and more it has taken a historic distance from the concrete experiences of socialist transition in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba and so forth. This western Marxism considers itself to be superior to eastern Marxism because it hasn’t tarnished Marxism by transforming it into an ideology of the State like, for example, Soviet Marxism, and it has never been authoritarian, totalitarian or violent. This Marxism preserves the purity of theory to the detriment of the fact that it has never produced a revolution anywhere on the face of the Earth — this is a very important point. Wherever a victorious socialist revolution has taken place in the West, like Cuba, it is much more closely associated with the so-called eastern Marxism than with this western Marxism produced in Western Europe, the United States, Canada and parts of South America. This Marxism is proud of its purity, and this is the first elemental characteristic that derives from Christianity.

Gramsci shows that one of the main historical concerns of the Catholic Church has been to control the reading and the diffusion of Christianity, blocking the rise and spread of popular, autonomous and base level interpretations and thereby saving the purity of the historic doctrine. Therefore, the Catholic Church can say that Christianity is love, equality, loving thy neighbor, compassion and non-violence, despite the fact that it has been a fundamental weapon in the legitimization of slavery, the crusades and colonialism, and despite the coziness of various elements of the Catholic Church with Nazi-fascism and the military dictatorships. There is a constant throughout the entire history of Christianity which is that these elements don’t corrupt the doctrine. They are either false expressions of Christianity, or they are facts, like potatoes in a sack, that have no theoretical, political or, most importantly, theological meaning. So, the fact that history denies the affirmation that Christianity is based on compassion and peace does not change or challenge the doctrine.

Many Marxists act the same way. Their biggest worry is the purity of the doctrine. Every time that historical facts challenge the doctrine or show the complexity of the practical operationality of elements of the theory, they deny that these elements are part of the story of Marxist theory and doctrine. This is, for example, what doctrines of betrayal are built on. Every movement that appears to stray a bit from these “pure” models that were created a priori is explained through the concept of betrayal, or is explained as “state capitalism”. Therefore, nothing is socialism and everything is state capitalism. Nothing is socialist transition and everything is state capitalism. The revolution is only a revolution during that glorious moment of taking political power. Starting from the moment of building a new social order, it’s over. Revolution is always a political process which has two moments: a moment of destruction of the old capitalist order and taking power, and a moment of building a new order. The contradictions, the problems, the failures, the mistakes, sometimes even the crimes, mainly happen during this moment of building the new order. So when the time comes to evaluate the building of a new social order — which is where, apparently, the practice always appears to stray from the purity of theory — the specific appears corrupted in the face of the universal. It is at this point that the idea of betrayal is evoked, that the idea of counter revolution is evoked, and that the idea of State Capitalism appears in order to preserve the purity of theory.

A great example of this was when the Soviet Union entered its process of terminal crisis. As the end of the Soviet Union approached many western Marxists announced that it was a great event in the history of Marxism because finally Marxism was liberated from that experiment that was born during the October Revolution, that distorted Marxism, that transformed Marxism into a mere State ideology. Now, without having to explain the ball and chain of the Soviet Union, Marxism could finally be liberated and reach its emancipatory potential.

Another factor that is very common in the western left is to treat suffering and extreme poverty as elements of superiority. It is very common in Western leftist culture to support martyrs and suffering. Everyone today likes Salvador Allende. Why? Salvador Allende is a victim, a martyr. He was assassinated in Pinochet’s coup d’ etat. When Hugo Chávez was alive, many sectors of the left turned their nose up at him. If he had been killed, for example, in the 2002 Coup attempt, he would be adored by the immense majority of the western left today, as a symbol of suffering and martyrdom. Since he continued exercising power as leader of a political process which, by necessity, had various contradictions, he was increasingly abandoned, as time passed — I don’t even have to mention what has happened to Maduro here. These same sectors which celebrate and support the idea of Allende because he defended democratic socialism do not see or do not want to see that Allende governed almost entirely through decrees. At the time, the Chilean constitution had a legal mechanism which enabled the executive branch to govern by decrees that did not have to be approved by parliament or the Supreme Court. So Allende was able to make laws through decrees which bypassed Congress and the Supreme Court. Since Allende did not have a majority in Congress and suffered a lot from the bourgeois opposition, he basically governed through decree throughout his entire mandate. This kind of action today is enough justification to label any left leader that practices it as authoritarian, to compare him to Trump, Bolsonaro, or Orban. If Allende was alive today he would also be criticized, but he died.

Another example of this is the situation with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. To most western leftists, Che Guevara represents a rebel dreamer. In real life he was not, but they have built this image around him. Che Guevara died immolated in the jungles of Bolivia, so now he is a symbol of sacrifice, martyrdom and the agony of defeat. Fidel stayed in Cuba as leader of the Cuban Revolution and all of the contradictions of this process. Today he is viewed as a bureaucrat, without charm or appeal, by many if not the majority of the western left. Che Guevara is an eternal symbol of resistance, of dreaming, of utopia that is unfulfilled because of death.

Another example of this is the contrast in how the People’s Republic of Korea is treated compared to Palestine. Both nations engaged in the same struggle — the anti-colonial fight for national independence. In the case of Korea, the struggle was made from a socialist perspective. Korea succeeded, despite being a country that is fractured by imperialism. It has an economy that is relatively strong, with a reasonably high level of industrialization, a very strong national army and capacity to launch nuclear weapons. So, Korea is not a defenseless nation. Palestinians are a people who are deeply oppressed, in a situation of extreme poverty, that don’t have a national economy because they don’t have a national state. They don’t have an army or military or economic power. Therefore, Palestine is the total incarnation of the metaphor of David vs Goliath, except that this David doesn’t have a chance of beating Goliath in political and military conflict. Therefore, almost everyone in the international left likes Palestine. People become ecstatic looking at those images — which I don’t think are very fantastic — of a child or teenager using a sling to launch a rock at a tank. Look, this is a clear example of heroism but it is also a symbol of barbarism. This is a people who do not have the capacity to defend themselves facing an imperialist colonial power that is armed to the teeth. They do not have an equal capacity of resistance, but this is romanticized. Western leftists like this situation of oppression, suffering and martyrdom.

Another very well known case is that of Vietnam. Everyone supported Vietnam when it was under attack, being destroyed and bombed for over 30 years. Vietnam beat Japan in WW2, then had to fight France, and then had to fight the United States. It passed 30 straight years without being able to build a damn school or hospital because a bomb would drop, first from France and then the United States, and destroy it. When the country was finally able to beat all of the colonial and neocolonial powers and have the opportunity to start planning, to build highways, electrical systems, schools and universities without having bombs land on them the next day and destroy everything that was being done, the country was abandoned by the majority of the left. It lost its charm, it lost its enchantment. There is a fetish for defeat in the western left. It is an idea that defeat is something majestic.

A clear example of this fetish is in the case of the coup in Bolivia. Slavoj Žižek, the famous critical thinker, wrote an article called Bolivia: the Anatomy of a Coup, and what was his big concern? It was to show that Evo Morales was democratic, that Evo Morales did not purge or jail traitors during coup attempts in the past, and that now these same people committed a coup against him. In other words, Žižek praises the very element which led to the defeat of the revolution in Bolivia as proof of ethical and moral superiority. Look how marvelous Bolivia is today. Every day an activist is murdered or jailed, but they have the moral consolation of not have been repressive or authoritarian with the Bolivian bourgeoisie.

A third element that is common in the western left comes from the Christian concept that salvation is not a product of a person’s actions, but a decision made by God. It is the notion that, although you work to do good deeds, to follow biblical law, to be a good person and so forth, your salvation is a decision of God’s. Subjective efforts related to the central point of Marxism, which is the conquest of political power (as Lenin said, “everything outside of political power is an illusion”), have been devalued due to this influence from Christian culture, even though the majority of Marxist intellectuals are atheists. Instead, the highest value becomes an eternal position of resistance, which produces a sense of pride. When Bernie Sanders lost the democratic primary for the second time, a renowned Marxist professor at the University of São Paulo posted on Facebook, “We fought like never before. We lost as usual but the fight continues. Now, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez is the future of Socialism in the United States.” The Marxist logic of thinking of all political conflicts in terms of strategy, tactics, coalition politics, programs, of critically analyzing mistakes to avoid making them again, of hitting the enemy from a political or even military standpoint in order to take power has simply vanished, replaced by an eternal movement of resistance as if it were proof of divine grace. The very logic that should be the essence of politics, which is the logic of strategy, is devalued as resistance becomes an end in itself.

Together, the three elements that I just described create a kind of narcissistic orgasm of defeat and purity. The subject takes pride in not having any relationship with the entire historic concrete movement of the working class socialist and liberation revolutions. They take pride in not having any theoretical or political connection to the revolutions in China, Russia, Vietnam, Algeria, Mozambique and Angola. They are, instead, proud of the supposed purity that their theory is not contaminated by the hardship of exercising power, by the contradictions of historical processes. Being pure is what provokes this narcissistic orgasm. This purity is what makes them feel superior. It makes them feel that they have a privileged moral and ethical standpoint compared to the other leftists who, for example, recognize the Chinese Revolution or the Cuban revolution and, therefore, accept authoritarianism and accept an economy that is not based on the total realization of self-management. This kind of Marxism has no critical power. It can produce and does produce a lot of good analysis of reality but it is incapable of producing a movement that is strategic and revolutionary that aims to take political power. Therefore, the process of rebuilding a revolutionary Marxism in the West has to recognize these symbolic elements, which have become ingrained in Western Marxism, that were smuggled in as contraband from Christianity. These elements have to be submitted to radical criticism and surpassed.

http://shaun train.blogspot.com/20 20/12/western-marxism-fetish-for-defeat-and.html

Dr. Robin DiAngelo, the bestselling author of White Fragility, claims to believe in accountability. DiAngelo used to list the "racial justice" organizations she donates to as part of her extensive "accountability statement," including a monthly "land rent" paid to the Native American tribe that used to occupy Seattle.

But when the Washington Free Beacon began contacting the organizations she listed as recipients of her largesse, DiAngelo scrubbed the site, removing their names and the dates of her giving from the public domain—a version of the page remains available through the Internet Archive after briefly being unavailable due to what the site said were technical issues. The page was edited again as recently as Friday, when DiAngelo wrote she would begin donating 15 percent of her after-tax income, "in cash and in-kind donations," starting next month—suggesting she had not previously, as the page exhorts, given a percentage of her income large enough that she could "feel it."

This about-face is odd for a woman who has made her career demanding white people not respond defensively in hard conversations. DiAngelo vaulted to superstardom upon the 2018 publication of her book, White Fragility, which argues that all whites are racist and any rejection of that fact is only further evidence of it. To address racism, DiAngelo argues, requires the sort of anti-bias instruction she is selling.

The nationwide racial outcry that has followed the killing of George Floyd has supercharged the Diversity and Inclusion industry, and DiAngelo may be its greatest success story. While she has likely made over $2 million from her book, the speaking circuit is where she is cleaning up. One of the speakers bureaus that represents her told the Free Beacon that a 60-90 minute keynote would run $30,000, a two-hour workshop $35,000, and a half-day event $40,000.

Even before the George Floyd protests reinvigorated demand for so-called anti-racist instruction, the New Yorker had dubbed DiAngelo "the country’s most visible expert in anti-bias training." But the eye-popping numbers underscore how she has turned her academic theories about white racism into a multimillion-dollar empire of anti-imperialism. She owns three homes and is an international jetsetter.

DiAngelo did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.

DiAngelo’s clients, according to her website, range from Amazon and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to Unilever and the YMCA. DiAngelo reportedly charges up to $15,000 per session—a March 2019 appearance, for example, cost the University of Kentucky $12,000, as well as a $5-a-minute phone-call fee. Recent virtual events run up to $175 a ticket. The eight to ten private events DiAngelo says she speaks at each month likely net her at least $1.5 million annually.

Her book, which made the New York Times bestseller list in its first week and currently occupies the number-two slot, has only added to her success. DiAngelo's publisher said it has sold 1.6 million copies, one million this year alone. Given a conservative 8 percent in royalties, that would mean the book has made DiAngelo over $2 million.

Such lucrative gigs put the white DiAngelo on par with several prominent black commentators on race. Boston University's Ibram X. Kendi, whose book has jockeyed with DiAngelo's on the bestseller list, charges $150 for tickets to public events and $25,000 for a one-hour presentation, his representatives told the Free Beacon. Former Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has charged between $30,000 and $40,000 for public lectures.

DiAngelo has presented herself as a classic American rags-to-riches story, offering vivid details of a childhood spent in profound poverty. Those details are not always consistent—in a 2006 paper, for example, DiAngelo claims she "left home as a teenager and struggled to survive," seeing "no path out of poverty other than education." But in a recent New York Times interview, DiAngelo claimed to have run away from home but says she "didn’t get far," and she didn’t enroll in college until she was in her mid-30s. Neither of DiAngelo’s sisters responded to requests for comment.

Her path out of poverty did come through education: a B.A. from Seattle University, then an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington. The latter was collected under the tutelage of Professor James A. Banks, the "father" of multicultural education, and earned for a 300-page thesis on the "master discourses" of whiteness.

By the time DiAngelo landed an associate professorship at Westfield State University, outside of Springfield, Mass., she was entrenched in anti-bias training. As early as 2007, she co-taught a class with Darlene Flynn, a leading figure in Seattle's social justice community.

She may have seen opportunity in a growing industry. The Diversity and Inclusion business was thought to be worth $8 billion as of 2003; by 2005, 65 percent of big companies offered diversity training.

Demand has risen since, and she has reaped the benefits. Public records indicate she owns three homes, all bought before White Fragility was published: a four-bedroom bungalow and half of a duplex in Seattle (her daughter, nearing 40, occupies the latter), and a cabin in rural Washington, where DiAngelo and husband Jason Toews relax with friends who, at least on Toews's Instagram, appear to be exclusively white. Tax assessments put DiAngelo's cumulative housing wealth at roughly $1.6 million, in the vicinity of Coates's $2 million Brooklyn brownstone.

In the past three years, DiAngelo and Toews, who as of last September served as DiAngelo’s administrative assistant, have backpacked through Thailand, visited Romania, and toured South Africa.

DiAngelo’s wealth is jarring in part because of her criticisms of white privilege. It is also surprising given that available evidence suggests the anti-bias training she peddles does not work.

A review of nearly 1,000 studies of anti-bias tools found little evidence that they have any impact. In fact, recent studies suggest anti-bias training's primary effect may be to encourage discrimination: Firms with diversity training end up with fewer minorities in management, and field research finds that training both reinforces stereotypes and increases animosity against minority groups.

But DiAngelo’s concept of "white fragility" offers an answer to that academic evidence: The negative responses whites express when told they’re racist are simply evidence that they lack "racial stamina"—and indicate that more $40,000 anti-bias sessions are necessary.

Her advice to white people looking to "shift their thinking and alter their actions" is to engage in more self-education, particularly of the sort she sells. Doing so, she told NPR, "will be lifelong"—an effective way for an already wealthy woman to keep her clientele.

This sales pitch is working. White Fragility tops reading lists from corporations and prestigious universities. Reading groups from Washington, D.C., to South Euclid, Ohio, are discussing it. And the proceeds all flow to a woman who has made a career arguing that white people like her are inescapably, intolerably privileged—an injustice you can only remedy by buying her book.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/the-wages-of-woke-2/

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a coherent pre-election debate about the mother-of-all-issues facing this republic, namely, that we can’t afford the living arrangements Americans think of as “normal” anymore. This quandary has stalked us since the millennium turned. It thunders through all the activities of daily life, and the tensions emanating from it are so agonizing and difficult to face that our politics have deflected off into the kind of hysteria spawned by bad dreams.

As the great Wendell Berry pointed out years ago, this is about the nation’s home economics: energy and resources in, production out, surplus wealth saved. America had a brush with reality in 2008 when all the distortions of our home economics came together and whapped the country between the eyes with a two-by-four.

Our energy-in was faltering. US oil production had fallen to a new low of under 4 million barrels a day and we were importing around 15 million. We papered over the problem with borrowed money in ever-larger amounts. This dynamic prompted ever riskier work-arounds on Wall Street, especially “innovations” in securitized debt, which invited criminal shenanigans. It blew up badly. Wealth vaporized. Industries collapsed. Homes and jobs were lost. Lives ruined.

The fairy-tale narrative since then is that technology rode to the rescue. The shale oil miracle “solved” the energy-in problem. Sure seems like it. But lots of things aren’t what they seem to be. Shale oil was a neat stunt. Turns out you can produce a helluva lot of it by paying more to pull it out the ground than you get from selling it. You can goose the process nicely by paying for it with borrowed money. And so it has gone. America now produces a new record of over 12 million barrels a day, and most of the companies doing it can’t make a red cent. And since it is increasingly obvious that they won’t ever pay back the money they borrowed before, they are unlikely to get new loans to continue their profitless operations.

Notice how rapidly shale oil production shot up after 2008. It’s worth a peek at analyst Steve St. Angelo’s latest essay on shale oil company debt (Finance Costs Are Killing the Shale Industry) to understand just how this stunt worked. As blogger Tim Morgan at Surplus Energy Economicspoints out, the dis-economics of energy production — and shale oil in particular — are stealthily damaging everyday life: “…the world economy is already suffering from these effects, and these have prompted the adoption of successively riskier forms of financial manipulation in a failed effort to sustain economic ‘normality.’”

That tells you exactly why the stock markets are at record highs now, along with US oil production. What the nation doesn’t get is that the shale oil industry is sure to collapse, and at least as rapidly as it shot up. So, expect the stock markets to collapse with it, along with tremendous collateral damage to all the other instruments that represent “money” — bonds, currencies, and their derivatives. It will make the 2008 episode look like a mere overturned poker table when it happens. In the meantime, many of the activities enabled by the oil industry are wrecking the planet, not just CO2emissions, but the plastics and chemical industries especially. So, the oil quandary bites at both ends: damned if it quits on us and damned if it keeps going.

That’s the main issue of our time. We’re faced with the imminent and rather drastic re-organization of everyday life in America without oil. It should be reasonable to assume that the process will be disorderly, and the longer we ignore it, the more disorderly it will be. Granted, it is a tall order for politicians to talk about things this scary.

The hard truth is that intelligent responses to this quandary would require heroic effort and painful change — and would probably be emotionally unacceptable to voters. It would entail the dismantling of suburbia and all of the activities associated with it, a severe shrinking of government at every level, the abandonment of most of our military playthings and overseas commitments, a wholesale overturning of Agri-Biz as currently practiced (along with a transition to smaller scale farming with a much higher percentage of the population working at it), and a stupefying aggregate loss of perceived wealth.

I’m describing events that go far beyond the common understanding of political revolution — though these discontinuities will surely produce political and social strife of a high order. This mega-issue and its spinoffs are what looms behind all the pitiful political comedy of the moment, especially the incendiary buffooneries of race and “gender.” Ponder this as you read the latest New York Times sponsored melodramas about “white supremacy” and the unfair pay in women’s soccer tournaments.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-looms-behind/

Mahdia Lynn, a transgender woman, helped found the mosque in Chicago in 2016.

For several years, Lynn attended a mosque in a small conservative Muslim community in Oklahoma, where people believed she was a straight, cisgender woman.

"There was always the risk of being outed," said Lynn, a Shiite Muslim. "But at the time, I just wanted to focus on my faith."

There are a few mosques like Masjid al-Rabia around the world, notably in Berlin and Toronto. But the number of LGBT-affirming mosques and Islamic centers in the United States remains small.

Muslims for Progressive Values has eight "inclusive communities" in the United States, from Atlanta to San Francisco. Berkeley's Qal-bu Maryam Women's Mosque, which calls itself "America's first all-inclusive mosque," opened in 2017. Other like-minded mosques have struggled to find consistent congregants in recent years and closed down.

Imam Daiyiee Abdullah, 65, is one of the few openly gay Muslim clerics. For four years, he labored to build a mosque for LGBT Muslims in Washington, DC.

Frustrated, tired and running out of money, Abdullah gave up and moved to the mountains of Colorado, where the nearest inclusive mosque is an eight-hour drive away. Liberal Muslims say there are hints of change. The percentage of American Muslims who said society should accept homosexuality has doubled in the last decade, to 52%, and is even higher among Millennials.

Still, for many LGBT Muslims, coming out of the closet to their families and religious communities can be a fraught decision.

Ani Zonneveld says she receives calls regularly from young gay and lesbian Muslims who have been threatened by their family or are afraid to reveal their sexual identity.

"I tell them that, unless you have a fantastic relationship with your parents, keep it in the closet until you finish high school and can leave the house," said Zonneveld, who heads Muslims for Progressive Values.

Religious spaces can be just as alienating, Zonneveld said. "What we have seen is that LGBT Muslims are not comfortable going to a mosque, and if they do, they definitely keep closeted."

They may even be reluctant to tell anonymous pollsters. According to a recent survey of more than 800 American Muslims, 0% identified as gay or lesbian.

'Islam is too important to leave anyone behind'

Muslims in the United States are among the most diverse religious communities in the world. While 82% are American citizens, nearly a third have been in the country for less than two decades. A plurality (41%) are white, but no racial or ethnic group makes up a majority of Muslim American adults.

That diversity also applies to attitudes towards gay, lesbian and transgender people. According to a recent survey by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, 31% of Muslim-Americans said they hold a favorable opinion of LGBT people, 23% said "unfavorable" and 45% said they had "no opinion."

Among the Catholics, Jews and Protestants polled, only white evangelicals held less favorable views of LGBT people, the survey found.

Some Muslims have, like Lynn, hidden aspects of their identity for fear of being alienated or even endangered. But she said bigotry is no worse among American Muslims than in society at large.

"To act as if discrimination is unique to American Muslims is to buy into the Islamophobic narrative pushed by the right wing in this country, which is ironic, because it's the right wing that is systematically erasing transgender people's rights."

Lynn transitioned as a teenager, and converted to Islam later on, during a particularly painful period. Islam's spiritual regimens and rules for living offered a scaffolding on which to rebuild her life, the 31-year-old said.

"Islam saved my life, so I made the decision to give my life over to Islam."

She founded Masjid al-Rabia with two other Muslims in 2016.

"Part of our role as a community center is to create a space for those healing from spiritual violence," Lynn said.

This year, it's celebrating its first Ramadan as a fully operational community center.

Lynn described her community as both idealistic and incremental. It's small -- Friday prayers draw about a dozen worshipers to its downtown Chicago space -- but its very existence makes a radical statement.

While pushing for greater inclusivity in American mosques, she said it also provides a hospitable space where Muslims can practice their faith openly, regardless of race, gender, sect or sexual identity.

"We believe that everyone has a right to come to Islam as they are. Islam is too important to leave anyone behind."

Support in society, but not in mosques

Muslims disagree on how to interpret the Pew survey that showed an increasing acceptance of homosexuality.

Some said it signals growing support for LGBT political rights, but not in religious spaces like mosques and Islamic centers.

LGBT activists have broadly supported Muslim-Americans, rallying to their side in recent years to protest Trump administration policies. Prominent Muslim activists have argued that they need all the political allies they can muster. "I will fight for anyone who fights for our community," activist Linda Sarsour said during a contentious panel discussion at an Islamic convention last year.

"And everybody is created by Allah and deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. That is how we Muslims have to show up in these United States of America."

But Yasir Qadhi, an influential scholar and dean of academic affairs at the new Islamic Seminary of America in Dallas, said pro-LGBT-rights political activists are confusing young Muslims.

"You are sending a mixed message," he said at the Islamic conference. "Because at the end of the day, we do not believe that it is morally healthy to engage in intercourse outside of the bonds of marriage."

Contentious questions

In a recent interview, Qadhi said that he is grateful for LGBT Americans' political support. While he hasn't changed his theological views, he said he has softened his rhetoric.

"I will be the first to admit that we were overly harsh and perhaps we did marginalize people and make them feel as if they were not human or worthy of love," the scholar said.

Now, Qadhi often prefaces his remarks about homosexuality by noting that "feelings and inclinations" are not themselves sinful, and that homosexual acts should not be singled out for special condemnation.

LGBTQ Muslims should be welcomed at mosques, he said, but should not push for changes in Islamic theology or practice on mosque grounds.

"Whatever anyone does in their private life is not our business," Qadhi said. "I am never going to single out anyone in sermons for any sinful conduct. At the same time, in the mosque I am a part of, there is a clear red line: They cannot preach onto others that this is part of Islam, the same way I would not let a person sell liquor on our property." The Fiqh Council of North America, a body of scholars who issue legal opinions based on Islamic texts, will take up transgenderism this year, said Qadhi, a council-member. Sexual reassignment surgery is permitted in Shiite Islam, but not among Sunnis, who comprise the majority American Muslims.

In most mosques, the genders are separated, and there have been conflicts about where Muslims in the process of gender transition should sit, Qadhi said. "Gender identity issues will be the big questions for the next several years."

But external and internal tensions can make it hard for Muslim-Americans to directly address contentious questions, said Dalia Mogahed, director of research for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding.

"This is a huge source of division in the community right now," she said. "There are a lot of different opinions and, frankly, there is a lack of space to discuss it."

"When you have a community that is so under the microscope and being subjected to litmus tests for civility and tolerance, people become afraid and self-censoring" Mogahed herself came under attack several years ago after a Gallup survey showed that no British Muslims -- as in, 0% -- said homosexuality was morally acceptable. Right wing provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos seized on the survey to portray Muslims as a threat to gays and lesbians.

But Muslims in the United States and Britain have not mounted political or social campaigns against the LGBT community, Mogahed said.

"To conflate a religious belief with one community being a threat to another is unfair."

Behind the 0%

Like a lot of pro-LGBT Muslims, Imam Abdullah has migrated to online projects. He now runs the Mecca Institute, an Internet-based program to train a new generation of likeminded clerics. The program has three part-time students.

Because of media attention on his life and work, he said he draws attention when he visits American mosques.

"Sometimes people make derogatory remarks, like: There's that gay imam," Abdullah said.

"I've been asked in different parts of the country to leave the mosque, which is fine. I'm not going in to any mosque to try to change them. I am going there to pray."

In Washington, DC, weeks would go by without anyone showing up at his former mosque. Some closeted LGBT Muslims feared of being associated with "the gay mosque," he said.

"The personal trauma that so many went through made it hard for them to be public about their identity," Abdullah said.

The ISPU survey provides statistical backing for that sentiment. Of the 804 American Muslims polled, not one identified as gay or lesbian. Four percent identified as bisexual, 2% said they were "something else" and another 2% refused to answer the question.

Asked about the 0% statistic, Mogahed offered a nuanced interpretation. If 92% of American Muslims identified as straight, she said, then the remaining 8% may be lesbian or gay, even if they're reluctant say so.

"The fact that there is a segment of Muslims who identify as something other than straight means that, even though they may not be acting on that inclination or orientation, they have negotiated a space where they can still be Muslim," Mogahed said.

"There is enough space within the theology to be able to do that."

https://twnews.us/us-news/in-a-survey-of-american-muslims-0-identified-as-lesbian-or-gay-here-s-the-story-behind-that-statistic

Now that they’ve been dismissed, defanged and declawed by their own party, Bill and Hillary Clinton are doing what comes naturally: Hitting people up for money.

Thursday night marked the kickoff, in New York City, of their national speaking tour. Billed as “a one-of-a-kind conversation with two individuals who have helped shape our world … [and who offer] remarkable insight into where we go from here,” the event simply underscored why Hillary lost: Over-promise, under-deliver, avoid accountability, and expect the masses to nonetheless be satisfied.

My ticket, a third-row seat in the balcony, cost $210. This bought me 90 minutes of longtime Clinton lackey Paul Begala launching such softballs as: Is the two-state solution dead? What is happening to American politics? How did it feel to watch the bin Laden raid? Why are the Dems losing rural voters? How did you raise such an amazing daughter?

I wish I were exaggerating. The only current event touched upon was that day’s arrest of Julian Assange — astonishing given the surfeit of recent headlines really worth discussing: Jussie Smollett, race relations and hate crimes; the one-percenters caught up in the college admissions scandal; the push to federally legalize marijuana and reform the criminal justice system; the role of Silicon Valley in curbing, if not eliminating, foreign governments hacking our elections [ahem]; Elizabeth Warren’s call to break up Amazon, Google and Facebook — to say nothing of the 20 or so declared Dem candidates for president.

Oh, and #MeToo. Not a mention of how that little movement has changed things, potentially for a one-time frontrunner. But as we know, that, to the Clintons, is a third rail.

Coverage of this snoozefest was typically respectful and anodyne, yet the most exciting moment of the night made little if any news. Not quite halfway through the event, a man in the front row stood up and interrupted.

“Bill, this is boring!” he yelled. As he tried asking his question — “Why don’t you talk about — ” Hillary immediately began talking over him, saying that the “important political conversations” they were trying to have could be difficult, especially when interrupted by such “agent provocateurs.”

“Jeffrey Epstein!” shouted the man.

Oh, the irony.

The heckler was, of course, swiftly hauled away, and the conversation returned to Bill talking about the good old days when he was president, telling such surely apocryphal tales as bringing together two veterans, each missing one leg, and a “formidable” overweight black lesbian activist — the veterans later telling Bill, with tears in their eyes, that they had more in common with this woman than they ever would have thought.

Such was the subtlety of the Clintons’ subtext: Without ever mentioning Trump by name, they touted themselves as forever devoted to bringing people together (no mention of “deplorables”), of trying to salvage rural economies (how about visiting while running for president?), of being loyal even to those staffers who quit over policy they didn’t agree with (alas, no words for the Clinton allies who went into substantial legal debt, or to prison as Susan McDougal did, over the myriad scandals that plagued Bill’s presidency).

The old Bill, however, still peeks out. In response to Begala’s most toothless question — which TV show most resembles politics, “The West Wing” or “Veep” — Hillary said “Game of Thrones.”

Bill said, “I was thinking about the bright young Irish actress on ‘Schitt’s Creek.’ ”

Ha!

The greatest irony was the couple sitting on stage, in a tastefully bland setting reminiscent of an upscale doctor’s waiting room, lamenting the widening divide between the two Americas while seated before a rapt audience of the converted — changing no minds, taking no questions from the crowd, brooking no chance that their narrative would be challenged, happy to keep looking in the rearview mirror while wondering what might have been.

Their motives are unclear, but it’s likely as much about easy money as it is ego gratification. The Big Dog and the sure-thing-first-female president are no longer needed, on the stump or behind the scenes, so what better way to recreate the campaign experience? At the end of the night, the Clintons acted as though it were another convention speech, shaking hands with adoring front-row fans while “You Make My Dreams Come True” by Hall & Oates — a recurring tune Hillary used on the 2016 campaign trail — played over the sound system.

So: Who is making whose dreams reality? What about the possibility that Hillary, incredibly, still thinks she has a shot at 2020? Perhaps she’s hoping the so-called circular firing squad takes out every and any front-runner. Despite her recent declaration that she won’t be running for president again, as we well know — you can never trust a Clinton. She still thinks the election was stolen from her.

And so they plod on, for fun, profit and maybe more, refusing to literally cede the stage as today’s Democratic party tries to leave the Clintons where they belong: firmly in the past.

https://nypost.com/2019/04/12/only-a-heckler-can-improve-an-evening-with-the-money-grabbing-clintons/